Data Citation Index (DCI)

The Data Citation Index on the Web of Science provides a single point of access to research data from repositories across disciplines and around the world.

Records in the Data Citation Index are intended to:

• provide attribution for a data object to the person(s) and institution(s) creating the data
• provide a standard form of citation for each data object to encourage citation (the format of the data citation recommended follows the DataCite guidelines)
• track citations and reuse of data in the scientific literature and provide bidirectional links between research articles and the data they use or generate
• provide a means to discover data associated with research publications.

ARDC has developed a process with Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters) that enables Research Data Australia (RDA) records to be transformed to a Data Citation Index (DCI) compliant format and harvested to DCI from ARDC. This means individual institutions are able to have their records indexed by DCI without having to develop their own feed to DCI and manage the ongoing process.

Broadly, in order to be accepted into the Data Citation Index, the records in a data source:

• must be able to provide minimum required metadata required to validate against the DCI schema
  • ARDC have developed a mapping from RIF-CS to the DCI schema and a guide to optimising records for DCI compliance.
  • Elements needed to create a data citation must be present in the metadata.
• should describe data objects held in repositories under the control of the ARDC partner or data provider
  • Records should not point to institutional web pages or replicate metadata descriptions for data held in other repositories, e.g. PANGAEA.
  • If your data source does contain such records, they can be "tagged" for exclusion from the harvest to DCI.
• should describe data collections, datasets or repositories - see RIF-CS Collection Type
• must meet the Clarivate Analytics repository selection policy.

For Research Data Australia contributors interested in participating, see Getting started with the Data Citation Index for more information.